Though it isn’t in the spotlight any more, WPF still continues to be a key-stone for rich client development on Windows. With full access to the .NET libraries and the underlying operating system, no other HTML or .NET-based UI technology can match it. Recognizing its importance, Microsoft is continuing to invest in improving WPF and especially its binding capabilities.

Working with PhoneGap is getting easier: Plugins make PhoneGap more modular and extensible for developers. PhoneGap/Build is an online service for automatically building PhoneGap applications for different platforms. InfoQ talked to Nitobi's Brian LeRoux about the technical future of PhoneGap at Adobe and Apache.

Given that Oracle is predominantly focused on enterprise software, it has been tempting to assume that the vendor would largely ignore client-side Java. It became clear at JavaOne this year, however, that Oracle is making a renewed push on the desktop, spearheaded by JavaFX. It will also be open-sourcing the entire JavaFX platform via OpenJDK.

The first public beta of JavaFX 2.0, Oracle's Java orientated rich client platform, is available for download, along with a beta plugin for NetBeans 7. JavaFX 2 represents a major update to the client-side Java stack, offering an alternative to the entire client layer of the JavaSE platform.

With all the focus on Silverlight, and more recently HTML 5, a lot of people have been wondering about the future of WPF. This in quite understandable, as silence from Microsoft’s press machine often means that the project is on hold, possibly forever. However, it could also mean they aren’t ready to reveal what they are working on.

The MacRuby team's busy working towards MacRuby 1.0, recently with the 0.10 release which adds XCode 4 support. Meanwhile, the first applications written using MacRuby have shown up in the Mac AppStore. Also: MacRuby seems to be part of the upcoming "Lion", Mac OS X 10.7.

MonoMac, the newest attempt at creating a GUI toolkit for C# on OS X, has hit its 1.0 release. MonoMac is designed to be much more consistent with other .NET/Mono libraries. This is done by offering a thicker wrapper around the Cocoa APIs that obeys the .NET Framework Design Guidelines.

Miguel de Icaza, founder of the Mono project, says that support for Windows Presentation Foundation on Mono is possible, but would require funding for 15 to 20 developers over a period of two to three years. As an alternative he proposes using other toolkits, but they too need community support.

Oracle has began to the beta program for JavaFX 2.0, the next version of its Rich Client platform.,with Early Access releases open to members of the JavaFX Partner Program. InfoQ spoke to Richard Bair about the release, and future plans.

When DevExpress released their roadmap for 2011, WinForms barely got a mention. As a ten year old technology that is basically abandoned by its creator this isn’t too surprising. But what it interesting the amount of negative feedback that generated. A lot of DevExpress’s customers just don’t see WPF or Silverlight as a viable replacement for their major applications.

Following on from Google's acquisition of Instantiations and their relaunch of WindowBuilder products, Google has announced that they are donating WindowBuilder Pro and CodePro Profiler to Eclipse.org, with an intention to release simultaneously with Eclipse Indigo in June 2011.

After saying about Silverlight that “our strategy has shifted” at PDC 2010, Bob Muglia attempted to clarify what he meant. Steve Ballmer and Tim Heuer also commented on Silverlight, trying to reassure the community on Microsoft’s commitment to Silverlight, but also pointing to the fact that HTML5 is the solution for cross-platform development, leaving Silverlight to the client and Windows Phone.

Dynamic languages have a dirty, badly kept secret: their IDEs and tools are written in languages like C/C++, C# or Java. Exceptions were languages like Smalltalk - but now Ruby and Javascript developers get to build their tooling using their preferred languages. InfoQ looks at HTML/Javascript based Cloud9 IDE and JRuby and SWT based RedCar.

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